Archive for the ‘Early Ford V-8 Foundation’ tag

All photographs and captions, courtesy of The Ford Dealership Volume I: 1903-1954, by Henry Dominguez.

Car dealerships are, to most people, forgettable places. They exist simply to display inventory and, if all goes well, provide a place where paperwork can be signed. But automotive enthusiasts like Henry Dominguez, author of several Ford-focused books, tend to feel differently about them. Dominguez’s The Ford Dealership, Volume I: 1903-1954 recognizes that the Blue Oval’s success was built as much on the showroom floors and workshops of dealerships around America as on the assembly line at the factory.

A Ford dealer and his employees at an unknown Ford dealership, 1911. The Model T in the window appears to be a specially built “speedster.”

Dominguez honors these places and the people who worked in them with 404 glossy, heavyweight, 8.5 x 11-inch hardbound pages. The rare photographs he has unearthed of dealership exteriors, interiors and service and parts departments are well organized, thoroughly captioned and nearly impossible to stop studying. Several have been sourced from businesses that have been dealing in Ford cars, trucks and tractors for more than a century.

Ellensburg Auto Company, precursor to Kelleher Motor Company, Ellensburg, Oregon, 1911. Mr. Jack Kelleher is in the lead Model T. Kelleher Motor Company is still in business today.

“What a wonderful group of men and women these Ford dealers are,” Dominguez writes in the Foreword. “Not once was I turned down when I called looking for that elusive photograph he or she may have stashed away somewhere. No wonder Ford Motor Company became so successful.”

We’ve included a small sampling of these marvelous photographs, to give you a taste for what you’ll find parked between the covers. To order The Ford Dealership Volume I: 1903-1954, go to the Early Ford V-8 Foundation & Museum, where proceeds of the sale benefit their important mission. Cost: $49.95, plus S&H. www.fordv8foundation.org 260-927-8022

More than 50 years after the Rotunda, a Ford icon and one of the most-visited locations in the United States, burned to the ground, the Early Ford V-8 Foundation has proposed a plan to re-create the building as part of its museum complex.

“It’s pretty exciting that we’re finally at a point where we have the ability and the land to do this,” said Bill Tindall, the foundation’s strategic planner. “Ford Motor Company will never rebuild it, and gazillions of people still remember it.”

Originally built as the centerpiece of Ford’s display at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934, the 12-story-tall open-center building featured a striking design by Albert Kahn meant to represent a concentric set of gears. At the close of the fair, rather than leave the Rotunda in place, Henry Ford had it dismantled, shipped to Dearborn, and then re-assembled across from Ford’s Administration Building as a welcome center for visitors touring the River Rouge factory complex. It re-opened in May of 1936 with displays that showcased Ford’s production process and technological prowess – sort of a stationary version of the General Motors Parade of Progress mobile displays.

The Rotunda remained an open-center design until 1953, when Ford both remodeled the displays within and installed one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes over the top of the center courtyard, allowing the entirety of the Rotunda to be used year-round. It was that dome that proved the Rotunda’s undoing: While workers were re-sealing the dome with tar in November 1962 in preparation for the Rotunda’s popular annual holiday show, the tar caught fire and quickly spread, destroying the Rotunda within an hour. Nobody got hurt in the fire, but it caused $15 million in damage and destroyed several one-of-a-kind show and concept vehicles, including the Gyron.

Pretty much all that the fire spared were Ford’s archives and the sign at the entrance to the Rotunda. After Ford decided to level the remains of the Rotunda in March 1963, it sold the sign to Jerome-Duncan Ford in Sterling Heights, Michigan, which in turn donated it to the Utica, Michigan, school district, which used the sign to promote school and community events for several years before putting it into storage. In 2010, the sign was then donated to the Early Ford V-8 Foundation, which spent the last few years enlisting volunteers to help restore the sign and place it out front of the foundation’s museum in Auburn, Indiana.

One reason the foundation worked hard to preserve the Rotunda’s sign was because its members already had a replica of the Rotunda in mind for a number of uses: to display cars and exhibits, as a meeting and banquet space, and to host fundraisers and other foundation events. Tindall said that plans for the Rotunda replica actually began to materialize in about 2007 as the second phase of the foundation’s plans to establish a permanent home in Auburn. At the time, however, the foundation was most concerned with finishing the first phase – putting up the existing museum building adjacent to the old Kruse Foundation complex – which has since completed and given the foundation a place to exhibit about a dozen cars and trucks and some displays.

Tindall said the plans for the Rotunda replica don’t call for an exact faithful re-creation of the original, however. “To save money, it’ll probably be about two-thirds to three-quarters size, but even then, it’ll still be the tallest building between Auburn and Indianapolis,” he said. Nor will the replica Rotunda use Indiana limestone facing as the original did; instead, the foundation will likely use pre-cast concrete, another cost-saving move.

While rough estimates for the replica range from $1 million to $5 million, Tindall said he anticipates the project will cost the foundation about $2 million and take about three years to complete. A commemorative coin program that the foundation began earlier this year has already started raising funds for the Rotunda replica project, and Tindall said he expects corporate memberships, grants, donations, and proceeds from events at the museum to help cover the rest. The foundation now needs to convert its architectural renderings of the Rotunda replica into mechanical drawings and put the project out to bid, steps that should result in a definite cost for the project (as well as a better idea of the size of the replica) and provide a goal for the foundation’s pending capital campaign.